Early reports In 1826, French scientist and naval officer
Jules Dumont d'Urville reported waves as high as in the Indian Ocean with three colleagues as witnesses, yet he was publicly ridiculed by fellow scientist
François Arago. In that era, the thought was widely held that no wave could exceed . Author
Susan Casey wrote that much of that disbelief came because
there were very few people who had seen a rogue wave and survived; until the advent of steel
double-hulled ships of the 20th century, "people who encountered rogue waves generally weren't coming back to tell people about it."
Pre-1995 research Unusual waves have been studied scientifically for many years (for example,
John Scott Russell's
wave of translation, an 1834 study of a
soliton wave). Still, these were not linked conceptually to sailors' stories of encounters with giant rogue ocean waves, as the latter were believed to be scientifically implausible. Since the 19th century, oceanographers, meteorologists, engineers, and ship designers have used a statistical
model known as the
Gaussian function (or Gaussian Sea or standard linear model) to predict wave height, on the assumption that wave heights in any given sea are tightly grouped around a central value equal to the average of the largest third, known as the
significant wave height (SWH). In a storm sea with an SWH of , the model suggests that a wave higher than would hardly ever occur. It suggests one of could indeed happen, but only once in 10,000 years. This basic assumption was well-accepted, though acknowledged to be an approximation. Using a Gaussian form to model waves has been the sole basis of virtually every text on that topic for the past 100 years. The first known scientific article on "freak waves" was written by Professor Laurence Draper in 1964. In that paper, he documented the efforts of the
National Institute of Oceanography in the early 1960s to record wave height, and the highest wave recorded at that time, which was about . Draper also described
freak wave holes.
Research on cross-swell waves and their contribution to rogue wave studies Before the Draupner wave was recorded in 1995, early research had already made significant strides in understanding extreme wave interactions. In 1979, Dik Ludikhuize and
Henk Jan Verhagen at
TU Delft successfully generated cross-swell waves in a wave basin. Although only monochromatic waves could be produced at the time, their findings, reported in 1981, showed that individual wave heights could be added together even when exceeding breaker criteria. This phenomenon provided early evidence that waves could grow significantly larger than anticipated by
conventional theories of wave breaking. This work highlighted that in cases of crossing waves, wave steepness could increase beyond usual limits. Although the waves studied were not as extreme as rogue waves, the research provided an understanding of how multidirectional wave interactions could lead to extreme wave heights—a key concept in the formation of rogue waves. The crossing-wave phenomenon studied in the Delft Laboratory therefore had direct relevance to the unpredictable rogue waves encountered at sea. Research published in 2024 by TU Delft and other institutions has subsequently demonstrated that waves coming from multiple directions can grow up to four times steeper than previously imagined.
The 1995 Draupner wave The Draupner wave was the first rogue wave to be detected by a
measuring instrument. The wave was recorded in 1995 at Unit E of the
Draupner platform, a gas-pipeline support complex located in the North Sea about southwest from the southern tip of Norway. The reading was confirmed by the other sensors. In the area, the SWH at the time was about , so the Draupner wave was more than twice as tall and steep as its neighbors, with characteristics that fell outside any known wave model. The wave caused enormous interest in the scientific community. A workshop of leading researchers in the world attended the first Rogue Waves 2000 workshop held in Brest in November 2000. In 2000, British oceanographic vessel
RRS Discovery recorded a wave off the coast of Scotland near
Rockall. This was a scientific research vessel fitted with high-quality instruments. Subsequent analysis determined that under severe gale-force conditions with wind speeds averaging , a ship-borne wave recorder measured individual waves up to from crest to trough, and a maximum SWH of . These were some of the largest waves recorded by scientific instruments up to that time. The authors noted that modern wave-prediction models are known to significantly under-predict extreme sea states for waves with a
significant height (Hs) above . The analysis of this event took a number of years and noted that "none of the state-of-the-art weather forecasts and wave models—the information upon which all ships, oil rigs, fisheries, and passenger boats rely—had predicted these behemoths." In simple terms, a scientific model (and also ship design method) to describe the waves encountered did not exist. This finding was widely reported in the press, which reported that "according to all of the theoretical models at the time under this particular set of weather conditions, waves of this size should not have existed". In 2004, the
ESA MaxWave project identified more than 10 individual giant waves above in height during a short survey period of three weeks in a limited area of the South Atlantic. By 2007, it was further proven via satellite radar studies that waves with crest-to-trough heights of occur far more frequently than previously thought. A 2012 study reported that, in addition to the Peregrine soliton reaching up to about 3 times the height of the surrounding sea, a hierarchy of higher-order wave solutions could also exist having progressively larger sizes, and demonstrated the creation of a "super rogue wave"—a
breather around 5 times higher than surrounding waves—in a
water tank. In maritime
folklore, stories of rogue holes are as common as stories of rogue waves. They had followed from theoretical analysis but had never been proven experimentally. "Rogue wave" has become a near-universal term used by scientists to describe isolated, large-amplitude waves that occur more frequently than expected for normal, Gaussian-distributed, statistical events. Rogue waves appear ubiquitous and are not limited to the oceans. They appear in other contexts and have been reported in
liquid helium,
nonlinear optics, and
microwave cavities. Marine researchers universally now accept that these waves belong to a specific kind of sea wave, not considered by conventional models for sea wind waves. A 2015 paper studied the wave behavior around a rogue wave, including optical and the Draupner wave, and concluded, "rogue events do not necessarily appear without warning but are often preceded by a short phase of relative order". In 2019, researchers succeeded in producing a wave with similar characteristics to the Draupner wave (steepness and breaking), and proportionately greater height, using multiple
wavetrains meeting at an angle of 120°. Previous research had strongly suggested that the wave resulted from an interaction between waves from different directions ("crossing seas"). Their research also highlighted that wave-breaking behavior was not necessarily as expected. If waves met at an angle less than about 60°, then the top of the wave "broke" sideways and downwards (a "plunging breaker"). Still, from about 60° and greater, the wave began to break vertically upwards, creating a peak that did not reduce the wave height as usual but instead increased it (a "vertical jet"). They also showed that the steepness of rogue waves could be reproduced in this manner. Lastly, they observed that optical instruments such as the laser used for the Draupner wave might be somewhat confused by the spray at the top of the wave if it broke, and this could lead to uncertainties of around in the wave height. They concluded, "... the onset and type of wave breaking play a significant role and differ significantly for crossing and noncrossing waves. Crucially, breaking becomes less crest-amplitude limiting for sufficiently large crossing angles and involves the formation of near-vertical jets". ==Extreme rogue wave events==